Under the Sign of Auschwitz: Melancholy in German Language Literature since 1960

这本专著将是开创性的，揭示了战后德国写作的一个研究不足的领域，并在理论上与人文学科的主流方法相抗衡。它探讨了一些主要作家的作品，他们利用欧洲长期存在的忧郁传统来评论最近的德国历史（Guenter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer， W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss, Ingeborg Bachmann）。然而，这种忧郁的使用尚未被确定为战后德国文学的一种趋势，特别是反映了奥斯威辛的遗产。这种疏忽源于德国忧郁主要与早期现代时期，巴洛克时期，浪漫主义，以及现代性危机的学术联系，并且在战后大多数关于德国文学忧郁的出版物中持续存在，这些出版物在20世纪之前就停止了他们的分析。然而，在20世纪下半叶，“忧郁”一词在文学上一直存在，因此，对这一时期的文学进行深入研究，将对战后和当代德国文学领域的研究和理解做出重大贡献。因此，它将吸引研究德国文化和思想史以及大屠杀的学者和学生。我的项目始于20世纪60年代，当时人们对“奥斯维辛”的理解首次出现，认为它是西方文明的断裂。正是在这个时候，亚历山大和玛格丽特·米切利希（Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich）将战后德国人的状况诊断为“无法哀悼”。然而，从20世纪60年代开始，主要的德国和奥地利作家从西方写作中汲取忧郁的主题，以谈论混乱过去的遗产，并提出对历史时间的政治共鸣理解。最近的文学现象，W.G.西博尔德，在许多作品中对1960年后的忧郁话语表示敬意，然而，尽管他的忧郁写作激发了许多学术出版物，“奥斯维辛”之后，这个词已经失去了它的历史特殊性，主要是从精神分析的角度来看待的。这有两个后果：缩小了忧郁的传统，以适应一种精神分析范式，这种范式具有与大屠杀作为世界历史上一个决定性事件的想法有关的独特的意识形态信息；忽视了主要作家使用忧郁作为讨论超越大屠杀和脱离精神分析的问题的一种方式。自20世纪60年代以来，没有人想到要扩大研究视野，将忧郁作为德国文学中更普遍的现象来研究，而且最重要的是，它公然违反了对大屠杀后历史的精神分析，将其视为无法形容的创伤。我很有能力在这个被忽视的领域提供一些新的东西，它将德国文学与当前关于记忆和历史本质的国际和跨学科辩论联系起来，与在战后背景下处理忧郁的专著（Blamberger 1985）不同，它批判性地考虑了“奥斯维辛”在西方思想中的无处不在。此外，我的专著建立在我已经发表的关于忧郁、德国和奥地利记忆文化以及我提议包括的几位作者的工作的基础上。

The monograph will be ground-breaking, uncovering an under-researched area of post-war German writing and positioning itself theoretically against dominant approaches in the Humanities. It explores the work of a number of major writers who use aspects of the long-standing European melancholy tradition to comment on recent German history (Guenter Grass, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, W.G. Sebald, Peter Weiss, Ingeborg Bachmann). However, this use of melancholy has yet to be identified as a trend particular to post-war German literature which reflects specifically on the legacy of Auschwitz. This oversight arises from the scholarly association of German melancholy predominantly with the Early Modern period, the Baroque period, Romanticism, and also the crisis of modernity, and is perpetuated in most post-war publications on melancholy in German literature which stop their analysis well before the 20th century. Yet melancholy has had a sustained literary afterlife in the latter half of the 20th century, therefore a well-researched study of literature in this period will make a significant contribution to research and understanding in the field of post-war and contemporary German literature. It will thus appeal to scholars and students of German cultural and intellectual history and of the Holocaust. My project starts in the 1960s when the understanding of 'Auschwitz' as a rupture in Western civilisation first began to emerge. This was when Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich influentially diagnosed the German condition after the war as 'the inability to mourn'. From the 1960s on, however, major German and Austrian writers drew on melancholy motifs from Western writing in order to talk about the legacy of the troubled past and to put forward politically resonant understandings of historical time. Recent literary phenomenon, W.G. Sebald, has honoured this post-1960 melancholy discourse in many works, yet while his melancholy writing has inspired many scholarly publications, post-'Auschwitz' the term has lost its historical specificity and is viewed largely from a psychoanalytical perspective. This has two consequences: the narrowing of melancholy traditions to fit a psychoanalytical paradigm with a distinct ideological message pertaining to the idea of the Holocaust as a defining event in world history; neglect of the way in which major writers use melancholy as a way of discussing issues that go beyond the Holocaust and that depart from psychoanalysis. No one has thought to widen the research horizon to investigate the use of melancholy as a much more general phenomenon in German literature since the 1960s, and crucially one which flies in the face of psychoanalytical readings of post-Holocaust history as unspeakable trauma. I am well placed to offer something new on this neglected area which connects German literature to current international and interdisciplinary debates on the nature of memory and history and which, unlike the one monograph that tackles melancholy in the post-war context (Blamberger 1985), critically takes on board the omnipresence of 'Auschwitz' in Western thought. Further, my monograph builds on the body of work I have already published on melancholy, German and Austrian memory culture, and on several of the authors I propose to include.